GROW YOUR OWN, AMIGO
Photo by Jorge Royan
BY BRIANNE ESTRADA
One of former President Barack Obama’s last acts was to open the U.S. embassy to Cuba, which allowed direct travel to the country for the first time in years. My father immediately bought tickets and I got to visit the country in the summer of 2016. As our departure date grew closer, my anxiety about the trip increased. From my history courses in high school and through what I’d read in the news, I knew of Cuba as a poor, Communist country run by a dictator. It had a stigma about it and I wondered what we were getting into by visiting it. The trip was eye opening. Although the people who live there are poor by our standards, they were the most resourceful people I’d come across.
There was much to learn about their past as to why this was so, but in light of a deadly pandemic that has strained supply systems and put farm workers and those working at food processing plants at higher risk that most others, I think about that trip and how Cuba’s sustainability-by-necessity might inform us now.
Every morning, the family that ran the casa particular (bed and breakfast) where we stayed in Havana greeted us with a breakfast of freshly made juice, cut fruit, an egg and toast. They gave us coffee, too, and since then Cuban coffee is the only coffee I’ll ever drink. The fruits were fresh and full of flavor. Every morning we ate this and felt energized till our next meal.
Following our stay in Havana, we traveled down to a small pueblo town called Trinidad. The town is known for being traditional, including the infrastructure. When we would venture out in the town on its pebble-stone paths, we’d often come across produce stands full of vegetables and fruit. When my family and I were feeling restless, we would walk outside and visit the fruit stand near our casa particular.
My father and my mother spoke to the vendor fluently in Spanish, asking him how he gathered all the fruits on display. The vendor said that “the fruit was collected from the outskirts of town, and the fruit selection was always different every few months because of the seasons.”
The fruit stand operator was happy to show us more about the produce development in Trinidad. We made our way down the streets to a more open area where there was a large patch of land dedicated to a garden. Suddenly, I was standing in a field of flowering green beans, corn, yucca, and many other vegetables.
“This is a communal garden where people from the neighborhoods can grow their own food. We have an understanding of what grows best for us each season, so right now our focus is green beans,” he told us.
As I explored the lot with my parents, I realized that I had never been to a community garden. Where I live, in Southern California, was probably one of the most forward-looking states, yet we are still far behind in practicing food sustainability. California throws away nearly 6 million tons of food waste each year—about 18 percent of the material that goes into landfills. This leaves 4.7 million adults and 2 million children that live in low-income households affected by food insecurity. As of 2019, the City of Los Angeles has about 1.4 million adults and 573,000 children who are affected by food insecurity — nearly half of the city’s population.
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Cuba was forced into sustainability by political and economic pressures that came to a head starting with the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba’s biggest trading partner. Sugarcane farms, for which the Soviet Union was the primary buyer, collapsed and became vacant. Cuban foreign trade fell 75 percent, agricultural production fell 54 percent, and levels of food consumption fell 39 percent. Cuban’s daily calorie intake fell from 2,600 in 1986, to 1,000–1,500 in 1993. Imports decreased to 50 percent within those three years as well.
The fall of the Soviet Union and the United States-led trade embargo in 1992 through the Cuban Democracy Act (CDA) put Cuba in an economic situation worse than the Great Depression.
The Cuban government declared the “Special Period in Peacetime,” shifting the country from dependence on international trade to more domestic development. This program rationed food, fuel and electricity, and gave priority to domestic food production and tourism. “The Cuban government began encouraging sustainable agriculture during the Special Period of the 1990s to increase production as Cuba’s land tenure laws advanced,” Caitlyn Davis of the Brookings Institution and Ted Piccone of the Foreign Policy, Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology wrote in the executive summary for “Sustainable Development: The Path to Economic Growth in Cuba.”
Cuba became “one of the first countries, if not the only one, that is experimenting with this pattern of alternative development on a national scale,” wrote Elisa Botella-Rodríguez’s “Cuba’s Inward-looking Development Policies: Towards Sustainable Agriculture” in 2011 for Historia Agraria.
Forced to isolate due to embargoes and lost trading partners, Cuba learned to survive, and surviving meant becoming self-sufficient and sustainable.
When the development began, the Cuban farmers had to completely disregard fertilizer because it was a scarce resource. By producing compost and other growing mediums, with the addition of proper irrigation, they eventually saw improvements in yield. Farmers used plants that control the proliferation of harmful insects. In 1995, Havana had 25,000 allotments tended by families and urban cooperatives. With Cuba’s climate, crops prospered and lasted all year round. Farmers were able to produce lettuce, chard, radish, beans, cucumber, tomatoes, spinach and peppers, which were traded.
When we asked how the garden came to be, the man who owned the urban farm in Trinidad said, “Russia fell… The country was trying to figure out how to sustain themselves without [Russia’s] help. So they decided to use the plots of land that were empty to build community gardens to grow food.”
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However, Cuba is no utopia. Its national dish is the well-known ropa vieja, but beef has been highly regulated by the government since the Special Period and only available to tourists, who can afford paying for a meal made with this red meat in a country where the average salary is $17-$44 a month as of 2019.
We learned about Cuba’s history with bovine when we traveled down to Cienfuegos, a town known for its coffee and sugar cane production. There, as with every town in Cuba, meat markets sell fresh meat. With the lack of refrigeration, though, smaller meat sellers often gather orders a day before and only process what is ordered for the next day. In Cuba, the primary sources of meat are pork and chicken, which expel much lower amounts of greenhouse gas-producing methane into the environment.
By the end of our trip, my family had lost a collective 25 pounds thanks to lots of exercise and eating lean meat. Once we were back in California, our bodies had to adjust back to the greasy and unhealthy foods that are staples even in what we consider healthy diets.
Cuba’s history and ways of life have taught me a lot about how California is going through similar events. COVID-19 has brought businesses to a halt and raised the specter of food shortages. Our agriculture and meat processing has been disrupted. Foods we depended on being grown and transported from far away places such can be accessed closer to home.
Oakland, California, for example, has set aside plots for urban farming that statistically produces a similar amount of food to an average farmer in Cuba. Cities that have “food deserts” can convert underdeveloped land for these purposes.
Urban farming can be further developed with vertical in-house farming, a tactic by which plants are grown in a controlled environment in vertically stacked layers. Vertical farming can produce foods such as bananas, corn, and mangoes that are often imported from abroad. Confined spaces such as old shipping containers or roll-off dumpsters can be deployed for vertical farming. The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Department of Energy points to vertical farming as a promising solutions to solving food insecurity.
Of course, we don’t just have to change our mindset about food production, there are also policy restrictions about what types of food we can raise in urban settings. Many municipalities require permits to farm certain types of animals, vegetables, and fruits. Some are more lenient. As California progresses on urban agriculture, dense cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco are working on utilizing urban farming.
On our first night in Cuba, we shared a meal cooked by the family in whose home we were staying. There were two Cuban avocados the size of my head, a pitcher of fruit juice, a bowl of rice and black beans mixed together, and one chicken for all of six of us. It didn’t seem like that much on the table, but it turned out to be more than enough for all of us there. On top of that, the food was delicious.
Food distribution and access will continue to change in the wake of pandemics, climate, and economic disruptions. The need to develop more autonomous and sustainable food systems in the United States is likely to increase in the coming years. Maybe Cuba has some agrarian lessons we can import?
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Brianne Estrada is a graphic designer who finds fulfillment in creating designs that educate the public about environmental and social issues. In addition to design, she expresses this passion for these topics through other creative outlets. She works with small businesses, influencers and nonprofits.
This article was originally published by Red Canary Magazine. A longer version of this story was originally published in Green Horizons on May 6, 2020, an online environmental journalism project from Whittier College in California and published on Medium.com.
The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Pacific Council.
